Why only seventeen? Because we’re too busy with the airplane project to come up with three more!

Hope you enjoy the chuckles… and hope they don’t hit too close to home!

THE LIST…

When your wife says your son was caught with dope and you get excited and run to the garage and turn on the lights.

When your new $25,000 truck sits outside in the snow while you protect $800 worth of wood and metal in the garage as you procratinate in building one of your wings.

When you don’t understand why your wife is mad at you for using the master bath shower stall as a spray booth — I mean, those parts aren’t going to zinc chromate themselves!

When you’ll spend $400 on gas, three days on the road, and 30 hours sifting through a junkyard in Wyoming in the middle of winter to find three good turbocharger cores, but can’t stand waiting for more than 5 minutes holding a purse outside the dressing room at Macys

When the local stray cat goes missing, but weeks later you find him after “smelling” something in the backyard — and it take 6 hours and a 12 pack to extricate him from the pile of parts in the yard.

When you go to an airplane museum for fun and end up needing to rent a trailer to come home.

When your idea of interior design is mounting pieces of battered metal “scored” from your wreckchaser friend on the walls, and you show your wife in all seriousness that Moto Art website when she says she wants a new dining room table.

When more than 20% of your home “junk drawer” in the kitchen contains either broken clecos, AN bolts, or odd shaped hydraulic fittings.

When the stack of Aircraft Spruce catalogs, Trade-a-Planes, and EAA Magazines in your bathroom is declared a piece of furniture.

When you’ve got a half-finished deck and patio out back, two-thirds of your house has been covered in Tyveck wrap for a year, and the shed out back still has a roof covered in a blue tarp, but you pride yourself in engineering and constructing a wooden rib and longeron steamer in two weekends.

When the yearly tax-return in April always seems to vanish in May when the local “fly market” happens at the local airport — I mean, where else are you going to find those fairings for that Navion you may eventually buy when the kids graduate from college?

When you are the only family for at least 400 miles that has a microfilm reader on the bureau in your bedroom.

When you become insanely jealous and wish YOU had a dry lakebed where you could horde cool stray castoff projects.

When your shop vac gets more use than the Hoover in the hall closet does.

When your digital camera has taken only about a dozen photos of your kids playing teeball, but is credited with 2000+ photos documenting your project.

When you can’t hide your stray fingernail clippings in the carpet because they are all stained black from your overzealous usage of the parts cleaner.

Adam uses the example of a Pilatus PC-6 obsessed pilot who would literally do anything, anywhere — just to get the chance to fly a PC-6. Yes, that’s the ugly STOL plane that can be found in the movie Air America… the one that looks like it stole aerodynamic theory from John Deere.

Anywhere means exactly that in this post — the PC-6 is used to get around in some of the most inhospitable areas — the jungles, the war torn, the mountainous. Basically places where the closest Hilton is not just miles away, but time zones away.

I’d sell my first born for a gig flying a Supermarine Spitfire… but that really doesn’t count, right?

Regardless, it is a perfect example of how devoted many of us are to flying. A devotion that sometimes makes the most logically minded people make decisions that escape logic.

I was reminded twice this past week about how small the aviation world really is. It seems like the old saying that we “are all six degrees away from Kevin Bacon” is especially true in aviation — but in this case, we are all four degrees away from Harrison Ford.

Earlier this week I got an email via Facebook of a fellow alum of Daniel Webster College (though a much more recent class) who now works at avionics manufacturer Avidyne. She said she works directly with one of my former coworkers at the Collings Foundation (I only had three) and was the direct contact with the avionics department at Cutter Aviation, my new employer. Her spot in my network basically represented the crossroads of my professional career!

Caution, if you are looking at some sort of historical retrospective on the Jetstar or facts and figures… stop reading — this is just an article based on pure opinion and observations. Otherwise, enjoy!

The Lockheed Jetstar is one of those airplanes that kind-of grows on you after a while. If you were like me, you hated it at first sight in the aviation books you read as a kid. Raised on the clean lines of the Gulfstream and Dassault Falcon lineage, I had little taste for the boxy-looking 1329 Jetstar myself. Everything just seemed wrong: four engines where two should be… square windows… those big damn tanks on the wings… and what about that barn door of a tail huh? Gosh, I wondered who in the heck would have loved it.